In the competitive pet supplies market, even a small pricing mistake can cost you sales and market share. Automated tools promise to make competitor price analysis easy, but in reality, product matching and data accuracy are far from simple.
In this article, we’ll explore the hidden challenges of comparing prices in the pet sector and share practical insights from real cases — helping you make informed decisions without losing sight of the full market.
Contents:
Why Competitor Price Analysis Often Fails in Pet Supplies
Why Product Matching in the Pet Supplies Sector Is Challenging
Challenges in Matching within the Pet Food Category
Visualizing Collected Data
How to Compare Your Prices with Competitors in the Pet Supplies Category
Why Competitor Price Analysis Often Fails in Pet Supplies
Let’s imagine that your quarterly goal is to increase sales in the Dog Food category by 5%. To achieve this, you choose a price-leadership strategy: prices for key SKUs will be set 5–7% lower than those of three key competitors. You approach the task thoroughly — you automate competitor price monitoring, regularly reprice, reduce margins, and launch advertising with the message “Best prices on the market.”
After a month, you review the reports and see the results: conversion remains at the same level, sales have not increased, and customers continue to buy from competitors.
You then manually check competitors’ prices and realize that your pricing analytics tool fails to capture around 30% of competitor prices, and in some cases does not collect promotional prices even though they are available. As a result, you spent the past month discounting inefficiently and remained uncompetitive exactly where it mattered most.
The core challenge of price analytics in the pet supplies niche lies in the technical complexity of collecting complete and accurate data — especially when promotions, special-price bundles, and multi-buy offers are involved. Due to the specifics of pet product categories, standard price monitoring tools typically identify only 60–70% of comparable competitor listings. Moreover, most price intelligence solutions are unable to accurately match and compare prices across the full range of products that exist both in your catalog and in competitors’ assortments.
For example, when a product in your catalog is listed as
Brit Premium Sensitive Adult dry dog food 15 + 3 kg — lamb and rice
and the same product at a competitor is listed as:
Brit Premium Sensitive Adult dry dog food for large-breed dogs with lamb and rice, 18 kg
the matching algorithm fails to recognize that these listings refer to the same product.
As a result, you either get an incomplete picture of the market or end up comparing apples to oranges, leading to flawed pricing decisions.
Why does this happen? Different product names across websites, varying units of measurement, and bundled offers all create a real challenge for anyone trying to automate competitor price comparisons in the pet supplies category. Matching products in this niche is particularly difficult because there is no standardized naming convention in the pet market. Identical products are listed differently across online stores, making accurate comparison a challenge.
In this article, we share real cases from our team, which works daily on product matching and price visualization in the pet supplies sector. Understanding these nuances will help you set up your processes to compare prices accurately and ensure you don’t lose sight of any part of the market.
Why Product Matching in the Pet Supplies Sector Is Challenging
Brands and Naming
The same brand can be presented in different ways across sellers.
For example:
- Bentonite Cat Litter Nature SaniPet, Large, 11 lb
- Bentonite Cat Litter Sani Pet, 11 Lbs
Variations you might encounter:
- Some sellers omit the manufacturer’s name (Nature) from the product title.
- SaniPet is often written as two words: Sani Pet. Searching for SaniPet may not return results listed as Sani Pet.
Another example:
- WAUDOG Nylon Dog Collar “Colors of Freedom” (10–14 in)
- Nylon Dog Collar WAUDOG Colors of Freedom (10–14 in)
The model name may appear with or without quotation marks: “Colors of Freedom” vs Colors of Freedom.
Different Quantities in Product Packs
Another common challenge is that products may look identical but be sold in different pack sizes. This is typical for veterinary medicines and multi-pack food items.
In such cases, these are considered different products:
- Flea and tick treatment: 1 spot-on applicator vs. pack of 4 spot-on applicators
- Wet food: 1 pouch vs. pack of 24 pouches
- Vitamins: 1 blister vs. set of 3 blisters
If you ignore pack quantity, you might mistakenly think a competitor is selling at a quarter of the price, when in reality they are just selling individually. Conversely, you could lose sales by not noticing that your pack is actually cheaper than a competitor’s.
Challenges in Matching within the Pet Food Category
In this category, product matching is a major challenge because each pet food item has numerous attributes that differentiate it from others: species (cat/dog), breed size, life stage (puppy/kitten, adult, senior), ingredient composition, grain-free vs. grain, wet vs. dry vs. semi-moist, weight/volume, calorie content, and more. Moreover, these attributes can be labeled differently across websites.
For example:
- Grain-free can appear as no cereals or without grains.
- The same life stage might be listed as adult, or 1+ years.
Automated systems often fail to recognize these variations as equivalent, leading to mismatches.
Unlike simpler categories where the product name alone usually suffices, pet food items with even slight differences in one parameter (such as protein content or package size) are considered distinct products. This means that if the product name does not match exactly, multiple attribute-level mismatches can follow, making accurate matching very difficult.
At Pricer24, we use the most reliable matching strategy: starting with brand + product line + weight as the foundation, then selecting the correct variant based on specifications + flavor + price. Without this approach, it’s easy to confuse, for example, puppy food for large breeds with adult dog food for small breeds.
Visualizing Collected Data
Another challenge in price comparison is visualizing matched products. This issue exists across categories, but in the pet supplies niche, it becomes even more critical. If competitor price data comes in an Excel table or a similar interface — in which you have to review hundreds of rows with similar product names one by one — it’s easy to miss a matching error or overlook an important price difference.
At Pricer24, we consolidate all the data you need for analysis on a single screen. For price comparisons, you’ll see a compact report that doesn’t require scrolling and highlights only the items that need your attention. You can review them immediately — for example, pre-sorted by price difference — and make pricing decisions in just a couple of minutes instead of several hours, as was often the case before.
To ensure you see only the data that truly matters and spend less time analyzing it, Pricer24 performs a substantial portion of the analytical work for you every day.
How to Compare Your Prices with Competitors in the Pet Supplies Category
- Demand transparency from your analytics tool
Ask:
- How many products in the category were found among competitors?
- How many were correctly matched to our assortment?
- What percentage of market coverage does the tool provide?
If the vendor can’t give you these numbers, that’s a red flag.
- Verify data quality
If the system shows that a competitor is selling the same product 40% cheaper (or more expensive), that’s a signal to check the matching manually:
- Is the pack size the same?
- Is the package weight identical?
- Do the products have the same formulation / are they really the same multi-pack?
In most cases (~80%), you’ll find that different product variants are being compared. Of course, exceptions exist (sales, promotions), but it’s better to spend a minute verifying than to reduce your price unnecessarily or lose sales due to incorrect comparisons.
- Demand high-quality data visualization
Automated price comparison should simplify your work by reducing analysis time and presenting information in a way that makes decision-making clear and easy.
- Invest in solutions with teams that understand your category
Generic tools designed for all categories often deliver incomplete results for pet supplies. Before partnering with a vendor, ask if they have experience specifically in your niche and what matching methods they use.
- Regularly validate your data
Select 10–15 key SKUs and check once a month whether the system correctly identifies them among competitors. This will serve as your quality control checkpoint for the data that underpins your pricing strategy.
Conclusion
Automating price analytics is no trivial task. It requires a strategy to overcome challenges related to product matching. If your tool relies solely on standard approaches without accounting for the specifics of the pet supplies category, you could be missing up to 40% of products available in competitors’ catalogs. Small details — from a missing brand name to different units of measurement — can be the reason you fail to see half of a competitor’s assortment in your comparison.
Making pricing, margin, promotion, or assortment decisions based on data that covers only half the market is essentially managing your category blindly.
Want to dive deeper into the nuances of automated price analytics in e-commerce? We recommend checking out the following articles:
How to Choose Pricing Intelligence Software: 7 Key Questions to Ask a Provider
Price Analytics from the Inside: What You Need to Know about Parsing, Price Comparison, and Data Quality
How Price Parsers Work: Types, Tools, and Best Practices for Competitor Pricing
